Perceptual organization, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension in adults with and without learning disabilities

Students with learning disabilities/attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in higher education dealing with remote learning: lessons learned from COVID-19 era

Introduction

The current study aimed to examine how students with learning disabilities (LD) and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) adjusted to higher education during the transition to remote learning (RL) in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

The study involved 621 undergraduate students, 330 of whom participated during the COVID-19 pandemic and 291 before the pandemic. Among these students, 198 had been diagnosed with LD and/or ADHD, while 423 had no reported disabilities (control group).

Results

Students with LD/ADHD generally had lower adjustment scores during face-to-face learning and RL than the control group. In-depth analyses of four subgroups revealed that students with LD + ADHD reported lower academic, emotional, and institutional adjustments as well as reported lower satisfaction with life during RL than the control group members. ADHD was found to directly predict low satisfaction with life through the mediation of adjustment scores.

Discussion

In conclusion, it is recommended that support be provided to high-risk LD/ADHD populations during a crisis. Furthermore, the implication of this study can inform intervention during emergency times.

Contribution of Lexical Quality and Sign Language Variables to Reading Comprehension

The lexical quality hypothesis proposes that the quality of phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations impacts reading comprehension. In Study 1, we evaluated the contributions of lexical quality to reading comprehension in 97 deaf and 98 hearing adults matched for reading ability. While phonological awareness was a strong predictor for hearing readers, for deaf readers, orthographic precision and semantic knowledge, not phonology, predicted reading comprehension (assessed by two different tests). For deaf readers, the architecture of the reading system adapts by shifting reliance from (coarse-grained) phonological representations to high-quality orthographic and semantic representations. In Study 2, we examined the contribution of American Sign Language (ASL) variables to reading comprehension in 83 deaf adults. Fingerspelling (FS) and ASL comprehension skills predicted reading comprehension. We suggest that FS might reinforce orthographic-to-semantic mappings and that sign language comprehension may serve as a linguistic basis for the development of skilled reading in deaf signers.

Academic Achievements of College Graduates With Learning Disabilities Vis-a-Vis Admission Criteria and Academic Support

Postsecondary entrance examination scores are generally low predictors of college achievement (grade point average [GPA]) for students with learning disabilities (LD). The difficulties with meeting academic requirements have raised the awareness of the needs of students with LD for support services. The present study examined the adequacy of entrance criteria to academic studies for students with LD and the effectiveness of three support levels during their academic studies in increasing their academic gains. Data were collected for 315 college graduates with LD and 955 graduates who do not have LD (NLD) who completed their BA studies in a college in Israel. Although the admission scores of graduates with LD were lower than those of NLD graduates, their GPA was higher than the GPA of NLD graduates. The psychometric score had a low correlation with final college GPA of graduates with LD. There was no difference in the final GPA of the graduates with LD in the different support programs. The findings suggest that academic support can be an effective way to help students with LD to eliminate or close the gap between them and NLD students and to earn an academic degree, regardless of what if any admission criteria were applied to them.

Screening for reading disability in university students with phonological processing and working memory tasks

Many students in higher education have undiagnosed reading disabilities (RDs), but there are few measures to screen for RD in this population. The aim of this study was to determine the ability of tasks that are sensitive to RDs-such as measures of phonemic awareness and working memory-to differentiate university students previously diagnosed with RDs from controls. Participants were university students with an RD (n = 26), a clinical control group diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (n = 24), and neurotypical controls (n = 44). Participants completed brief phonological processing and working memory tasks. The RD group scored significantly lower on all tasks than both control groups. The phonological processing tasks alone-without the working memory task-discriminated participants with RDs from controls with excellent sensitivity and specificity. A brief battery of phonemic tasks could be an effective screening instrument for persons with RDs on university campuses.

The Enigma of Poor Performance by Adults With Cochlear Implants

OBJECTIVE

Considerable unexplained variability and large individual differences exist in speech recognition outcomes for postlingually deaf adults who use cochlear implants (CIs), and a sizeable fraction of CI users can be considered "poor performers." This article summarizes our current knowledge of poor CI performance, and provides suggestions to clinicians managing these patients.

METHOD

Studies are reviewed pertaining to speech recognition variability in adults with hearing loss. Findings are augmented by recent studies in our laboratories examining outcomes in postlingually deaf adults with CIs.

RESULTS

In addition to conventional clinical predictors of CI performance (e.g., amount of residual hearing, duration of deafness), factors pertaining to both "bottom-up" auditory sensitivity to the spectro-temporal details of speech, and "top-down" linguistic knowledge and neurocognitive functions contribute to CI outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS

The broad array of factors that contribute to speech recognition performance in adult CI users suggests the potential both for novel diagnostic assessment batteries to explain poor performance, and also new rehabilitation strategies for patients who exhibit poor outcomes. Moreover, this broad array of factors determining outcome performance suggests the need to treat individual CI patients using a personalized rehabilitation approach.

Lifelong Reading Disorder and Mild Cognitive Impairment: Implications for Diagnosis

Although neuropsychological tests are commonly used in the evaluation of possible mild cognitive impairment (MCI), poor test scores may be indicative of factors other than neurological compromise. The current study assessed the role of lifelong reading disorder on MCI classification. Community dwelling older adults with a suspected developmental reading disorder were identified by inference based on reading test performance. Individuals with a suspected reading disorder were significantly more likely to perform at a level consistent with MCI on several commonly used neuropsychological tests. The findings suggest a relationship between a history of reading disorder and MCI classification.

Excellent Word-Reading Ability in the Context of an Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study of a Swedish-Speaking 7-Year-Old Boy

This case study seeks to extend our knowledge of the phenotype associated with excellent word reading in autism spectrum disorder by a detailed examination of psycholinguistic, neuropsychological/cognitive, and classroom/academic functioning of a Swedish-speaking 7-year-old boy (called “Jonas”). On age-referenced word reading-decoding assessment, Jonas scored among the top 7%. Reading comprehension status varied as a function of information source. Jonas’s phonological processing and phonological memory performance was found to be normal to strong. In contrast, he scored poorly on tests of oral semantic, syntactical, and narrative language. On the WISC-III, Jonas performed highly uneven across subtests from impaired to above average levels. On the Kaufman factors, Jonas had a peak in perceptual organization (IQ score 119), thus reflecting very strong visual attention skills, which together with normal to strong phonological abilities might underlie his excellent word reading. Finally, both his parents and teacher reported on other classroom-learning skills and difficulties.

A user-study measuring the effects of lexical simplification and coherence enhancement on perceived and actual text difficulty

PURPOSE

Low patient health literacy has been associated with cost increases in medicine because it contributes to inadequate care. Providing explanatory text is a convenient approach to distribute medical information and increase health literacy. Unfortunately, writing text that is easily understood is challenging. This work tests two text features for their impact on understanding: lexical simplification and coherence enhancement.

METHODS

A user study was conducted to test the features' effect on perceived and actual text difficulty. Individual sentences were used to test perceived difficulty. Using a 5-point Likert scale, participants compared eight pairs of original and simplified sentences. Abstracts were used to test actual difficulty. For each abstract, four versions were created: original, lexically simplified, coherence enhanced, and lexically simplified and coherence enhanced. Using a mixed design, one group of participants worked with the original and lexically simplified documents (no coherence enhancement) while a second group worked with the coherence enhanced versions. Actual difficulty was measured using a Cloze measure and multiple-choice questions.

RESULTS

Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, 200 people participated of which 187 qualified based on our data qualification tests. A paired-samples t-test for the sentence ratings showed a significant reduction in difficulty after lexical simplification (p<.001). Results for actual difficulty are based on the abstracts and associated tasks. A two-way ANOVA for the Cloze test showed no effect of coherence enhancement but a main effect for lexical simplification, with the simplification leading to worse scores (p=.004). A follow-up ANOVA showed this effect exists only for function words when coherence was not enhanced (p=.008). In contrast, a two-way ANOVA for answering multiple-choice questions showed a significant beneficial effect of coherence enhancement (p=.003) but no effect of lexical simplification.

CONCLUSIONS

Lexical simplification reduced the perceived difficulty of texts. Coherence enhancement reduced the actual difficulty of text when measured using multiple-choice questions. However, the Cloze measure results showed that lexical simplification can negatively impact the flow of the text.